Slowness Poem by Oliver Roberts

Standing in the space between when we touch and when we don’t,
I watched from a distance as we kissed.
Together we had formed a tunnel;
something roared inside its depths,
something bursting with a sparse silence.
With our hands we felt our way along the walls,
clenched fingertips gliding over twilight,
detecting the smooth holes that let in mists of rain.

You stood on tip toe and reached up through the wet openings,
plucking startled stars from the sky and pouring them into my mouth.
They seeped and burned along my tongue,
and I tasted your warmth that had kept them stuck to heaven.
From where I stood, I watched our bodies curve and bend,
I saw how the width of our arms opened upwards,
and how, like a net, they captured all the kisses we’d let drift in our absence.
I saw how, when I kissed you, you wore the face you wear in my dreams.

We hid inside each other’s mouths and lost the knowledge of breathing.
When my face passed over yours, you cooled and changed the shapes of shadows.
Around us, voices and sound broke off and collapsed into the sea;
now we only spoke with the blurred outlines of our swollen lips.
We glided towards the final separation, still carrying first touches in our sails.
You cracked open your eyes and showed me the earliest image of me that you’d put inside them:
I was standing in the a distance, still watching you as I was now,
secretly shedding sunsets, waiting for the saturated perfection of this moment.